Till now correlation functions have been used in electron microscopy for two purposes: a) to find the common origin of two micrographs representing the same object, b) to check the optical parameters e. g. the focus. There is a third possibility of application, if all optical parameters are constant during a series of exposures. In this case all differences between the micrographs can only be caused by different noise distributions and by modifications of the object induced by radiation.Because of the electron noise, a discrete bright field image can be considered as a stochastic series Pm,where i denotes the number of the image and m (m = 1,.., M) the image element. Assuming a stable object, the expectation value of Pm would be Ηm for all images. The electron noise can be introduced by addition of stationary, mutual independent random variables nm with zero expectation and the variance. It is possible to treat the modifications of the object as a noise, too.
Development of an all-optical framing camera and its application on the Z-pinch